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Reports

Future food: A report on alternative proteins 2018

Unsustainable rates of consumption, coupled with anticipated population explosion and pressure on natural resources has given rise to the discussion on Alternative Proteins. Taking into account a growing population and shifting diets, the world will need to produce 69 percent more food calories in 2050 than we did in 2006. (e.g. compared to staples such as potatoes, wheat, and rice, the beef per calorie requires 160 times more land and produces 11 times more greenhouse gases)

Cell therapy, and cell culturing in general, is an extremely labour intensive and suffers from low productivity. The lack of well defined standards make the reproducibility of the experiments questionable. The appropriate training of the workforce is lengthy and unreliable. The cost and complexity of fully automated systems can be barriers for researchers used to manual cell culturing. Ready-to-go systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and are not always “ready-to-go,” partially because of the time needed to learn programming the machine. A new market is emerging for automated cell culture systems to perform experiments and standardize the protocols so it can be repeated easily anywhere. This is important not just for production, but the R&D market as well. Conservatively estimated the total prevalence of irreproducible preclinical research to exceed 50% with a cost of $28 billion per year in the United States alone.